How to create a template in Obsidian (Beginner's Tutorial)

This video is a beginner's guide to Templates in Obsidian. We cover two different levels of templates: basic templating and advanced templating with Templater Plugin.
Too many videos over-complicate things. My goal in this video is to explain how to use Obsidian Templates in plain English so you can start using them as soon as possible.
If you like this, and want to see more content, please let me know by liking, commenting, subscribing, or otherwise making yourself heard.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:08 Creating a folder for your Templates
2:17 Creating our first Template file
3:58 Adding folder to Template plugin settings
4:58 Create new note from template
5:32 Creating a snippet template
6:50 Templates Level 2 - Templater
9:01 Templater code beginner's overview
11:21 Creating a template with Templater code
12:05 Making all new notes use templates
15:01 Use button to create note from template
17:39 TROUBLESHOOTING - Button didn't work lol
19:32 Outro
Links from this video:
- Templater Documentation - silentvoid13.github.io/Templa...
- Templater Github page - github.com/SilentVoid13/Templ...
- Daily Note Template Code gist.github.com/dannberg/48ea...
Additional Obsidian Videos:
- My Obsidian Daily Note Template video - • 📆 Obsidian Daily Note ...
- My Obsidian Meeting Note Template video - • 🗣 Obsidian Meeting Not...
- My Obsidian People Note Template video - • 👥 Obsidian People Note...
- My Obsidian Physical Object Template video - • 🛍️ Obsidian Physical O...
My Gear:
- Sony a6300 Mirrorless camera - amzn.to/3wkTfSn
- Sennheiser MKE 600 Shotgun Microphone - amzn.to/3wqlQFT
- Neewer Professional Microphone Pop Filter - amzn.to/3T0nmr0
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- Full gear list - dannb.org/my-gear/
More links:
- (blog) Obsidian Daily Note system - dannb.org/blog/2022/obsidian-...
- (blog) Obsidian People Note system - dannb.org/blog/2022/obsidian-...
- (blog) Obsidian Book Note system - dannb.org/blog/2022/recalling...
- (blog) Daily Driver Task Management System - dannb.org/blog/2020/daily-dri...
Where to find me:
- Homepage - dannb.org
- The Dann Chronicles monthly newsletter - dannberg.substack.com
Thanks for watching!

[@waltwinters9253]

Thanks for sharing the templates plug-in. All these years and I’m still making templates by hand like a goober. Good idea to use “extras” folder. I will steal that.

[@DannBerg]

Happy to help! And you’re going about it the right way: learning a new way to make an existing process easier.

[@kellancerveny4620]

Dann, your content rules! I just adopted your people and meeting templates for my own vault. You clearly have a knack for this. Please tell us about what you use obsidian for in your day to day

[@DannBerg]

Thank you! Definitely have some content planned about the overall system and how everything works together. Keep an eye out!

[@claire2326]

These videos are so incredibly helpful! I've already integrated your other MOC templates and they've really helped to streamline my work. Will you also make a video about your blog post about recalling books using Obsidian? :)

[@DannBerg]

I definitely plan to make a video about my book process. In fact, that entire post is due for an update. Will be working on that soon! Thanks for the kind words.

[@toteZitrone]

I'm just at minute six and already feel the urge to smash the like button to death. :D I really like your fast forward and direct way of explaining. I'm new to obsidian since yesterday (the hertly welcome really hit me :D) and creating a template was something I was really stuck with. Turns out my main error was not understanding, that the "tamplate folder" under settings simply wanted me to refer to an Obsidian Folder, which I then could create those premade notes in. Nethertheless: I checked your channel and saw, that the Obsidian topic is relatively new. So I'm hoping for many more videos to come, having you as a source makes me feel more comfortable with all the stuff tehre is to learn, since it is so pleasent and efficient to watch you video. It's really great how you sprinkle in "noob" information, without getting lost in lengthy explanations. I feel that you always just nail the right information amount one needs to get along. Now I have to watch on and eventually figure out how to embedd css styles to a template. Many thanks and kind regards.

[@DannBerg]

Welcome to the Obsidian family. :) And honestly, my advice with CSS styling is to find a theme that gets you mostly there, and then ask ChatGPT for some help with the CSS. I've had some good luck with CSS styling and AI. Unless you already know CSS and want to know specifically how to embed CSS styles into a Template specifically. In which case I'm not exactly sure, as I don't think you can modify CSS based on tags? I'm really not sure though.

[@toteZitrone]

@@DannBerg Luckily, I know CSS, at least I used it some years ago and the W3 documentary still is excellent to look up all the details I forgot. What I found out so far is, that you can specify a CSS class for a note via the property function. So it is relatively easy to style certain notes, by defining a corresponding template that has the CSS class already put in it. However at the moment I do struggle a bit to address one of the main Divs, which displays the notes content. It changes its CSS class depending on whether you are in preview/reading mode and for some reason, nesting the css class doesen't work with one of this modes, as if suddelny it would loose its child properties... IDK... perhaps I'm doing something wrong, it's really strange, but I'm quite sure I can find a work around. In general, as for overall changes of background, font-family, etc it worked really well. (: You also only have to define .css snippets which override/add to the default file and do not have to upload a whole new file. That's very convenient. (: Basically I just set up a snippet to redefine the background(image), font, colours and some borders for that specific CSS class, which will be already applied to the notes in their template, to give this notes a bit of a different vibe, while the general interface of the programm stays the same.

[@DannBerg]

@@toteZitrone Very cool! That's good to know that you can style notes based on a Property. That works really great with templates. I haven't messed with the appearance of my vault at all, so I can't give any help here, but it sounds like you're well on your way to getting it figured out.

[@scottcardais3560]

Thank you very much. Your explanations are very clear and helpful.

[@DannBerg]

That's what I was going for. Thanks!

[@Ted_Pincas]

Excellent tutorial, thank you very much for this.

[@DannBerg]

Glad you found it helpful!

[@chessstructures2648]

Thank you Dann!

[@f.r.schmid2607]

chapeau! really good and comprehensive video! Thx! :D

[@DannBerg]

Thank you!

[@nikunjarya6292]

thanks!

[@Proliiii]

Hey! Your videos are great! I've got a question though, I didnt quite catch what specifically defined a "snippet"? Was it the Title within the Templates folder?

[@DannBerg]

I use the term "snippet" to basically refer to a template that's not a full page. You create snippets the exact same way as you would create templates (as shown in the video) but most people think templates must be entire pages, when it also works for much smaller snippets of text

[@CanDoSo_org]

Thanks, Dann. I was wondering, how can I update the old notes's properties automatically when I update the templates which created these old notes. Is that possible? For example the old templates has 5 properties. Now I want to add one more property. Which is fine for new notes. But what if I want to the old notes have the new added property as well?

[@DannBerg]

I haven’t done this myself, but I imagine there’s a plugin to help with this. I just found this Reddit thread that might help: www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/169ni4o/is_there_a_way_to_add_properties_in_bulk/

[@CanDoSo_org]

@@DannBerg Thanks, Dann.

[@jasonm9825]

Awesome but templater doesn't seem to work anymore 😢

[@DannBerg]

Templater isn't working for you? What's the issue you're having?